


it wants your blood

by belatrix



Category: The Mentalist
Genre: Gen, Implied/Referenced Torture, Kidnapping, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-01
Updated: 2016-11-01
Packaged: 2018-08-28 11:15:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,531
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8443756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belatrix/pseuds/belatrix
Summary: Jane finds Red John. This is the game they play, now.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I wish I was sorry. I believe this falls under the category of "what even", but I can never resist those.

The truth is―

He hadn’t expected this. In all the twists and edges he built into the board of their chess game, he had always assumed ( _known_ ) he would be the winner, triumphant, come curtain call.

“Patrick,” he starts now, slow, trying very hard to come to terms with the fact that there is a gun pointed directly at his heart ―a joke on poetic justice, perhaps, since so many believe he doesn’t have one. Meat, however, is always meat. “I do not mean to be trite, but you really should not do anything _too_ hasty.”

“Is this how you negotiate your life?” Jane asks. There is an off tilt rising in his voice, amused and near-hysterical, and not Patrick at all. _At all_.

(Maybe, just maybe, Red John does not know his adversary best, as he believed. It’s a sting, unthinkable.)

There’s a hint of… something in Patrick Jane’s smile. He thinks he has seen it in the mirror, before.

The gun is steady still, catching shocks of lamplight that reflect off the walls in silver stripes. _Fear_ , unfamiliar companion, consumes him as he thinks about making a mad dash for the door.

Imploding on impossibility, the bottom line is simple and Red John’s mind focuses on a single thought: _it can’t be_ ―

 

 

 

“I’m glad you and I are finally having some time together.”

Jane ―he could like this side of the consultant so very much, he knows, if only the universe were restored to its proper balance― locks eyes with him and smiles, plastic and predatory. He seems to be burning with nerves, a bomb about to go off.

Red-wire, blue-wire, then.

“I figured you’d be above gloating, but I do have to admit you are entitled to it.” Maybe the last thing Red John has left is the illusion of control, and this he plans ― _is desperate_ ― to keep. “Do you want me to plead with you, Patrick? Do you want to see me broken? Or just dead?”

The silence that follows is like a dripping heart, pitter-patter crimson on the floor.

 _Well_.

Jane’s fingers find his jaw with troubling familiarity. “I’ve been looking for you for nearly ten years,” he says, like kicking someone into the grave. His smile deepens, it seems, lines crinkling around his eyes. _Mocking_ him. “Shouldn’t your death last at least half that?”

 

 

 

A miniscule loophole: Patrick Jane was not born for violence.

His enemies, he decapitates with words and secret smiles, but clever turns of phrase are, at the end of the day, not unlike knives. Jane has the precision it takes, and what he lacks in expertise he makes up for with sheer determination.

He never says, _I hate you_ , but it’s burned into every line of his body, reverberating. Blood must answer blood, after all.

At some point, Red John starts screaming.

 

 

 

This is not a romance.

That is what he tells himself as Jane leans close enough to kiss, but his own mouth is filled with red and all the world’s ugly, while Jane’s a cracked mirror. The pieces put together all wrong, but _there_ nonetheless. Hands like spiderwebs, they will never truly mold around the handle of a blade, but it doesn’t matter. Nothing truly does.

“I thought you’d be different,” Jane says, quiet, contemplative. He’s really not that bright for a star, not that merciless for a monster.

It’s… interesting.

“You’ve thought about this a lot?” Red John finds the words are difficult to force out, and everything inside him hurts ―there’s a pool of blood around him and for the first time, it’s his.

“Maybe,” Jane allows. A tilt of the head, almost too faint to catch in the half-light. “I always assumed I’d kill you the moment I got my hands on you. This is quite the novelty.”

Red John doesn’t ask himself why he isn’t fighting back. Perhaps he is, but it doesn’t really feel like it. “A parasite never wants to kill its host,” he says, hoarse. He always did like aiming straight for the jugular.

A laugh, then, that sounds more like coughing up stale smoke. “Me, a parasite? I hope you realize it’s always been the other way around. You’re the one who latched on and wouldn’t let go.”

Red John doesn’t answer, because ―well, that is not entirely untrue. And maybe that’s the catch, after all. They’re the same, and simultaneously not at all. Jane is not a beast, but he has the gift of cruelty boiling under his bones, and hatred is hatred, and death is death.

But Jane presses on, and he really is beautiful like this. Shining red and broken and a little half-mad. “ _Are_ you negotiating, after all?”

The world seems to go very still. “With you? Always.”

 

 

 

If he opens the door, Jane will shut it. If he runs, Jane will chase.

This is the game they play, now.

 _How the mighty have fallen_ , Jane tells him, shaking his head.

 

 

 

When they kiss, it feels like an executioner’s axe falling, a clean silver arc through the air.

It’s messy and red, and he’s tied down… to something, chains and rope circling around him like a vice. Jane’s hands are holding him like they’re trying to tear him apart, pull back skin and plunge into the lifeblood underneath.

Jane bites him, and hits him, and kisses him again. “I’ll kill you,” he says, and Red John thinks―

― _you already have._

 

 

 

He stops screaming soon enough.

 

 

 

“What do you tell the others?”

Jane shrugs, all too blasé. He’s sitting at the other side of the room, a trail of rust-brown between them, a drip-drip-dripping sound puncturing the air. “I tell them nothing.”

Red John scrutinizes his features as best as he can, looking for some veiled truth, a thing he might have missed, a―

“Do they not worry?” A stagnant pause. “Agent Lisbon, especially. Has she never seen you with blood on your clothes? Has she not noticed that you’re gone for days at a time? That you do not mention me any more?”

Jane stares, at him and straight through. “Are you concerned about my relationships with other people?”

“I wouldn’t know how.”

Jane hums a response and continues to observe with placid disinterest, as if he hasn’t been holding a man captive for nearly a month. The rigid bearings of feigned nonchalance, Red John can see them ― _really, now?_ Jane should give him a little more credit.

But, murder hides in a small crevice where obsession pools to rot, and the truth becomes destroyed. Eviscerated. Gutted and open in festering halves.

And just like that, a smile like stitches spreads across Jane’s face. A bright-slick knife wound. “You’re a resilient thing, after all,” he says, and he might as well be talking to himself.

 

 

 

The natural closure of dead skin being peeled away―

“I don’t want to die,” he says, and wills the words back once they’ve left his mouth, burst from his throat like canaries. For a moment, everything darkens and stops, the same feeling of a casket being kicked shut.

Jane turns to look at him, vicious and beautiful and filled to the very brim with broken, desperate villainy. “Come again?”

With slow steps, shoes smudging into little pools of crimson, he closes the distance between them and stands, ready to burst like he’s carved out of glass splinters. There is no laughter, but Jane crouches down and he looks―

“Try that again,” he says, a swift hand circling around Red John’s shoulder. “Add a bit more supplication, this time.”

 

 

 

Resonating from the floor above, Jane plays music.

It’s soft and mournful and altogether bellicose. A perfect melody to soften minds and bring forth tears, but there has been too much blood for that, and Red John can make himself believe of it whatever he chooses as he muses over the irony of it all.

The air smells like rust and there’s something heavy, something desperately vile hanging around him, closing in like metal arms. But the music carries on ― _a taste of your own poison_ , it seems to be saying, a poetic, lilting thing inching along his shoulders.

Inhale and exhale.

 _Inhale and exhale_.

Somewhere along the way, he lost track of time, but everything he has ever known is shrinking down to this, this moment like a sting, like a slap, with a funereal tune to lace it all together, a bright red bow on top.

The thing is, he knows death as well as he knows himself, but not like this. Never like this.

So, _is this the end?_ he wonders, and waits, and waits―

 

 

 

“The end,” Jane confirms, running cold fingers down the side of his face, but it might all be a dream, after all.

 

 

 

Curtain call is a rotting corpse that lies forgotten on the floor.

(Jane lights the house on fire in the aftermath of it all, the first thing he does is light a match and watch the flames like he wants to burn with them.

But he pulls himself away from the stench of decay, and so it ends, his hands clean and the front of his shirt spattered with rose-red.

The truth is―)


End file.
